1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging apparatus, a control method for the imaging apparatus, a program, and a storage medium and, in particular, to a technique preferably used for displaying a three dimensional (3D) image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a movie using a three dimensional (hereinafter referred to as 3D) image has increased. Along with that, a home-use television set corresponding to stereoscopic display of a 3D image similarly has been developed. When a recording and reproducing apparatus such as a camcorder is connected to the home-use television set corresponding to stereoscopic display, it is assumed that a graphic user interface (GUI) of the camcorder will be commonly displayed in 3D.
The 3D image is displayed using stereoscopic principle such that images for the left eye and the right eye are prepared and respective images are relatively shifted in the horizontal direction to display the left eye image and right eye image which are different in relative position. An amount of protrusion from a screen (a stereoscopic effect) is controlled by difference in the relative position. The difference in the relative position is taken as binocular parallax. Thus, a user perceives parallax between the left eye image and right eye image to view a stereoscopic image according to the amount of parallax.
Until now, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-49668 discusses an apparatus, serving as the GUI using a stereoscopic display, in which attributes of an object (such as use frequency, importance, taste of a user, and others) are extracted and an amount of protrusion of stereoscopic display (a stereoscopic effect) and a stereoscopic display period are determined according to the extracted attributes to convert data. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-155155 discusses another apparatus in which the user can optionally adjust parallax based on the control signal from a remote-control interface to adapt a stereoscopic effect to an individual observer.
In the apparatus discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-49668, a stereoscopic display form of an object is determined based on information about its attribute, so that the user cannot optionally change the stereoscopic effect. In the 3D display, the stereoscopic effect varies according to the user, so that due to a predetermined amount of parallax, a desired stereoscopic effect is not acquired depending on the user. In the apparatus discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-155155, although the user can optionally change the stereoscopic effect, consideration is not made as to what operation should be made to intuitively adjust parallax.